Energy Accounting & Bill Auditing

Independent Energy Consultants uses a powerful accounting system to set up your facilities, organizational structure, cost centers, vendors, accounts, utility rates, and more.

We input your utility bills and our systems quickly pinpoint billing or meter errors. We provide you with 24x7 online access to a wealth of quality information that will allow you to make better business decisions. Watch this demo on the powerful system we license, setup and maintain to manage your utilities. This 3-minute demo may be your best investment in time as you embark on truly learning how to manage your energy use and spend.

Utility Bill Auditing

Approximately 50 billing audit calculations are performed to spot possible errors and verify the accuracy of utility billing. IEC monitors, trends, and compares current bills to historical monthly bills in order to spot discrepancies in parameters such as total cost, total consumption, per unit cost, per unit consumption, peak demands, load factor, length of billing periods, estimated meter readings, and overlapping bill periods. User-defined limits flag bill discrepancies in need of further review or correction. IEC will assist with collection and/or credits for overcharges.

Based on your preferences, we will either audit your bills after they have been paid, promptly review them, and send your Accounts Payable (A/P) staff notice of when bills are correct for payment. Our smart energy accounting system can also be linked to your A/P system if desired.

Rate Code and Tariff Analysis

Your utility company assigns you a rate schedule based on an estimate of your anticipated use of electricity or natural gas. Sometimes they guess wrong and often conditions change after a rate schedule is assigned. Your rate schedule determines how much you are billed. Often a facility qualifies to be billed under one of several rate schedules. IEC will calculate your bill under each acceptable rate schedule and show you which is best for your situation. If electricity savings or natural gas savings are available, we will identify any switching costs and propose a plan that is best for you. Rates and riders change and the energy consumption of most facilities changes over time. We recommend an annual analysis to determine the most appropriate rate code for your unique business.

Once a Rate Code analysis is performed to ensure you are being billed under the most advantageous rate, we go an extra step to let you know what can be done to minimize your costs under that rate schedule. Our analysis looks for excessive demand charges, ratchet demands, power factor penalties, time-of-use pricing, etc. Once these factors are known, procedural changes can be implemented to avoid operating under high-cost conditions.

Benchmarking

Like many business processes in a competitive environment, it is helpful to compare your energy cost and consumption vs. similar facilities. Let us show you how your facilities stack up to others. Often this first step will let you know if any additional efforts are recommended. If your building is a good performer and you would like to demonstrate your environmental stewardship, we can help you obtain the Energy Star Label.

IEC licenses the powerful EnergyCAP software to provide utility bill auditing and energy accounting services. The icon below is a free tool that will provide you with an idea of how your particular facility stacks up against its peers. The benchmarking tool in EnergyCAP provides many additional ways of benchmarking multiple facilities at a time.

Cost Avoidance Verification

Cost avoidance is the name given to the money that was not spent because an Energy Cost Measure (ECM) was performed or installed. It is calculated by comparing a baseline energy consumption before the ECM to the energy consumption after an ECM, and adjusts for independent variables that influence your usage. The energy not consumed is multiplied by the current rate to determine the avoided cost. The independent variables that influence a utility bill change by season, region, occupancy, hours of operation, the product produced, etc. IEC can provide independent verification for clients that contract with 3rd party vendors that the vendor-installed ECM is operating as specified. Performance Contracting and/or energy loans and grants require this verification. For information please refer to our blog on this topic.

Energy Budgeting and Forecasting

Easily create budgets and track actual expenditures at any level of your organization. Whether it's your entire Midwest region or an individual facility meter, you will know quickly where things are going well and where your attention is needed. If something changes in your organization or you want to make sure you hold onto that year-to-date budget underruns, you can make mid-year adjustments with just a few clicks. It's time to take control of your utilities by accurately forecasting costs and incorporating them into your planning process.

For many customers budgets will be impacted by weather conditions that drive winter heating and summertime cooling needs. The EnergyCAP software automatically imports local weather data and calculates its impact on your energy consumption. This powerful information not only allows you to better forecast and budget your costs, it helps explain over/underruns when they occur. The icon below is a free tool to give you an idea of how weather conditions might impact your upcoming energy consumption.